Web search services, such as those provided by Yahoo! and Google, are among the most popular and important applications available on the Internet. Access to the full array of content on the Internet is difficult, if not impossible, without the facilities provided by such services. The availability of the Internet has spread to many Asian countries such as, for example, China and Taiwan.
This presents a significant challenge. There is much content that is available in traditional Asian character sets, and searching such content requires the entry of such characters. Electronic devices, such as computers and mobile devices typically provide user interface elements based on the Roman characters. Asian characters can only be entered indirectly using an equivalent based on the Roman character set, such as Pinyin (Chinese), or some other complicated set of key entries. This can pose a barrier to the use of the Internet to large segments of Asian populations, such as the elderly, that are unfamiliar with the Roman alphabet or Asian character equivalent systems.